Ecommerce SEO Case Study: Highest Revenue For 2 Years In 6 Months

In this case study, I’ll show you what strategies we used to rank:

And the best thing is:

Within 6 months, organic traffic and revenue were the best they had been in over 2 years.

So keep reading to learn the exact techniques we used to achieve those incredible results.

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

This client has an e-commerce site that sells customizable t-shirts.

The site was already established, but it had a range of issues and was losing traffic and revenue for over a year before we started working on it.

Our aim was to:

1. Get the site back on a positive trajectory.
2. Gain the top-of-first-page rankings for a range of niche-specific terms.

Our primary focus was on the term “t-shirt printing”, which is a very high-value term for the business and generates approximately 5,400 searches per month.

But it wasn’t easy.

We had to overcome a few challenges along the way…

The Biggest Challenges We Had To Face

As I said earlier, the site was already established when we started working on it but had a range of issues and had been losing organic traffic and rankings for over a year.

The former owner of the site had done some low-quality link-building in previous years, which was pretty typical of an ecommerce site that had been actively doing SEO for years.

We also discovered the site needed a fair amount of on-site work after conducting an initial site audit when starting the campaign.

To recap, these are the biggest challenges we had to face:

So, in order to put the site back on track, we built a solid plan of attack…

Creating The Plan Of Attack

So with an uphill battle ahead of us…

…we put a simple 2-step strategy in place to guide us in to search for success!

Step #1: Link Building

During the first 6 months of the campaign, we built out 100 links from relevant authoritative domains.

We were able to take advantage of the fact that we could bridge content from any niche into this niche to really expand our potential net of target domains to get links from.

The site had some low-quality legacy links but not enough to trigger Penguin, in our opinion, so we decided it was not worth removing and disavowing links.

To counter the lower-quality links, we added new high-quality links and built out the branded anchors to avoid the site getting hit by future Penguin updates.

Step #2: On-Site Optimisation

To accompany the link-building campaign, we also worked with the site owner and his developers to increase the on-page content.

The site was lacking in text-based content for Google to crawl and determine what each page was about and should potentially rank for.

Once the extra copy was added to the site we also:

…which helped improve the crawlability and on-page targeting for the site.

The Results Are In

As you can see from the below table of ranking increases for the tracked target terms we have seen excellent gains across the board.

Since we started working on the site, we have bought the site back to its highest organic traffic and revenue levels for over 2 years within 6 months of starting the campaign.

Looking at the site’s overall search visibility for the past 2 years in SEM Rush.

As you can see, when we started the campaign, the site was at an all-time low and had been steadily losing search visibility for the best part of 2 years.

We saw some big gains after the initial on-site work and link building with the upward trend continuing as new links were added and the site further optimised.

When we started the campaign, the site was showing for the following number of terms according to SEM Rush:

The site is currently showing up in Semrush for:

Wrapping It Up

If you ever buy a website that has some off-page and on-page SEO issues, make sure to:

If you do that, you should be able not only to get a decent amount of search traffic but also to improve the user experience for both Google and visitors.

If you need help with your site, feel free to contact us!